16.11.

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'This is revolutionary’: new online bookshop
unites indies to rival Amazon
Bookshop.org, which launched in the US earlier this year, has accelerated UK
plans and goes online this week in partnership with more than 130 shops

Alison Flood

Mon 2 Nov 2020 00.01 GMT

It is being described as a “revolutionary moment in the history of bookselling”: a socially

conscious alternative to Amazon that allows readers to buy books online while supporting
their local independent bookseller. And after a hugely successful launch in the US, it is
open in the UK from today.

Bookshop was dreamed up by the writer and co-founder of Literary Hub, Andy Hunter. It
allows independent bookshops to create their own virtual shopfront on the site, with the
stores receiving the full profit margin – 30% of the cover price – from each sale. All
customer service and shipping are handled by Bookshop and its distributor partners, with
titles offered at a small discount and delivered within two to three days.

“It’s been a wild ride,” said Hunter, who launched the site in the US in January. “Five
weeks into what we thought was going to be a six-month period of refining and improving
and making small changes, Covid-19 hit and then suddenly we were doing massive
business.”

Initially starting with 250 bookshops, more than 900 stores have now signed up in the US.
“We went from selling $50,000 (£38,000) worth of books in all of February, to selling
$50,000 a day in March, then $150,000 a day in April,” said Hunter. By June, Bookshop
sold $1m worth of books in a day. The platform has now raised more than $7.5m (£5.7m)
for independent bookshops across the US.

“We were four employees plus me, working at home, getting up as early as we could and
going to bed as late as we could, trying to make it all work. It was a real white-knuckle
ride,” said Hunter. “But it was extremely gratifying because the whole time we were getting
messages from stores saying, ‘Thank God you came along, you’ve paid our rent, you’ve paid
our health insurance this year.’ If you’re going to have to work in insane circumstances and
with huge amounts of stress, it’s good to be doing it in something you feel good about.”

Bookshop is a benefit corporation in the process of applying for B Corporation certification

in the UK, created with the mission “to benefit the public good by contributing to the
welfare of the independent literary community”. Rules state that it can never be sold to a
major US retailer, including Amazon.

Hunter believes the reason for Bookshop’s quick success is readers’ fondness for their local
booksellers. “Bookstores have been in trouble for a while because of Amazon’s growth, but
this pandemic has really accelerated it. Amazon has gotten much more powerful, while
there are 100-year-old stores that are hanging on for survival,” he said. “I think we were so
successful because enough people were conscious of that, and wanted to rally around their
beloved bookstores, because they care about the world that we emerge from this pandemic
into.”

Hunter had been planning to launch Bookshop in the UK in 2021 or 2022. But after seeing
the success of the platform in the US, shops, publishers and authors in the UK asked him
to step up the timeline. Bookshop.org launches in the UK on Monday, with more than 130
British bookshops already signed up and 200 expected by the end of the year. The UK arm
of the company will be run by managing director Nicole Vanderbilt, the former
international vice-president of Etsy.

“If you don’t get there before Christmas, and give people a way to support their stores and
buy their gift books, then it’s gonna be really catastrophic for shops, which is why we’ve
scrambled all hands on deck to get it up,” said Hunter.

Bookshops make no financial investment, with all customer service and shipping handled
by Bookshop, and, in the UK, by distributor Gardners. The browsing experience is
intended to “mirror the joy of discovering a new book in a physical bookshop”, says the
company, with experts, rather than algorithms, doing the curating. Each independent that
joins has its own “storefront” page, where customers can browse virtual tables of
recommended books. For example, a user can see what the owner of The Shetland Times
Bookshop (“Britain’s most northerly general bookshop, situated over 60 degrees north and
closer to Norway than to London”) personally recommends, in lists such as “wonderfully
funny picture books I’ve read to the bookshop staff”, and “books to help you take life in
your stride”.

British booksellers and publishers have welcomed its arrival. “Being an independent
bookseller has for so many years been such a David v Goliath battle that it feels slightly
disconcerting when someone at last hands you a bazooka instead of you peppering away
with your slingshot,” said Andy Rossiter of Rossiter Books in Ross-on-Wye.

Philip Gwyn Jones, publisher at Picador, described Bookshop as “a positively revolutionary

moment in the history of bookselling in the UK, and in the evolution of the relationship
between writers and readers”.

“It’s hard for us to compete with someone that’s got its own warehouse and sells books
sometimes at a loss, or at very small profit margins. We just can’t do that. So it’s nice that
Bookshop.org is going to rival Amazon in a way we couldn’t on our own or even
collectively,” said Georgia Eckert, of Imagined Things bookshop in Harrogate. “You’ve got
to have the reach, a site that’s big enough, run by a proper team of people dedicated to it.
We’re all running our own businesses and haven’t got time to be doing that.”